You help bring a brand’s voice to life. Whether optimizing content for on-page SEO or creating high-converting sales page copy, you know you have the right skills for the job.
Are you putting the right elements on your resume to help you land new gigs? Are you using a professional resume template?
While you may be a script and blog writing master, deciding what to put on your resume can feel more challenging. We’ll show you how to harness your writing skills to create a cover letter as well as write a top-notch resume through our freelance writer resume examples.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Freelance Writer Skills & Work Experience
The first thing many of your prospective clients will look at is your top job skills. However, it isn’t uncommon for many freelance writers to wonder what they should put here.
A great way to optimize is by considering each company or client’s needs and what they list in their job postings. For example, a company hiring medical content writers may seek medical literature review and data interpretation skills.
Here are some top industry skills freelance writers can include on resumes.
9 top freelance writer skills
- On-page SEO
- Google Analytics
- WordPress
- Technical Research
- Proofreading
- Blogging
- Scriptwriting
- CRO
- Case Studies
Sample freelance writer work experience bullet points
Once you have the right set of skills down to grab a hiring manager’s attention, like blogging and CRO, you’ll want to showcase how you’ve used those abilities effectively in your previous work experience.
Actionable examples of what you achieved will work best in this section. For instance, you could write about how you performed detailed proofreading to reduce revisions required before posting content by 54%.
Keep these examples short and straightforward, like writing brief social media content or email newsletters. It’ll help hiring managers quickly identify the skills they’re seeking.
Here are a few samples:
- Reviewed performance data in Google Analytics to identify 12 ways content could be optimized to increase conversion rates by 66%.
- Optimized headlines by including the primary keywords and ensuring they were less than 60 characters long to boost impressions by 46% and CTR by 39%.
- Created 5 weekly blogs with well-structured on-page SEO to increase organic clicks from search results by 5,300 over a 4-month timeframe.
- Improved subject lines for email newsletters by making them more relevant to customer needs to boost open rates by 49%.
Top 5 Tips for Your Freelance Writer Resume
- Proofread thoroughly
- Nobody wants to hire a writer who will produce content needing several revisions due to grammatical errors. So, always proofread your resume before submitting it to showcase your accurate writing skills.
- Measure your impact
- The results you achieve as a writer are crucial to your client’s success, so adding numbers to each achievement you list is a great idea. For example, you could explain how you improved workflows to help publish 2,000 extra words of content each week or adjusted CTAs to generate 13% more email list signups.
- Keep it to one page
- Freelance writing is a competitive industry where hiring managers will receive many applicants. Keep what you include to a concise one-page overview of your most relevant skills, like technical documentation and research for a company seeking technical writers.
- Make examples more engaging with action words
- While writing content, you probably use an active voice to keep readers engaged. You can do the same on your resume using action words like “created” or “enhanced.”
- Use a resume outline
- Just like a well-planned outline can make a huge difference in the writing process, it also does the same for your resume. A resume outline will help you maintain a professional feel as you customize yours for each company’s needs, such as emphasizing your abilities in email newsletters for a company that focuses on email marketing.
Freelance writers should use reverse chronological formatting. It’ll help showcase your most recent and relevant abilities first for today’s content needs, like knowledge of EEAT or writing short-form video scripts that are growing in popularity.
If you have a relevant degree, you should list it. For example, a journalism degree could show your ability to write news content. Even degrees unrelated to writing can help in some industries, such as an exercise science degree helping you stand out if you’re applying to be a fitness writer.
There are still plenty of ways to show your abilities as a writer. You could emphasize academic achievements, projects, or transferable skills from work in other fields. For example, while applying to be a news writer, you could detail how you boosted readership while writing for your school’s newspaper.
